Shara Monteleone graduated from the Law Faculty of Florence (Italy), and after a Masters degree in Communications Law, she obtained a PhD in Law and Information Technologies from the Media Integration and Communication Centre (MICC) of the University of Florence in 2007. She worked as post-doc researcher at INRIA (Grenoble, France), involved in particular in the PRIAM project (Privacy Issues in Ambient Intelligence). As university lecturer, she carried out several studies and participated in research projects in Media Law (with a constitutional and comparative law perspective) at the Department of Public Law (University of Florence and Universitad Autonoma de Barcelona), focusing on privacy and data protection issues. She took part in several European research projects including: a project on “Support to the reform of Serbian media legislation towards EU standards and strengthening of legal and technical skills of media professionals” under the Cards Programme 2004/2005 (during which she contributed to the drafting of the Serbian legislation on Data Protection and of the Code of Conduct for Journalists); and a project on the European legislation and praxis on electronic evidence ("Admissibility of electronic evidence before Court", 2006).

Recently, she obtained a LLM in Comparative, European and International Law from the European University Institute of Florence (EUI), focusing on Ambient Intelligence and the right to privacy - the case of detection technologies. Her previous working experiences include collaboration with the ITTIG-CNR (Istituto di Teoria e Tecnica dell' Informatica Giuridica, Centro Nazionale di Ricerca italiano), the Chamber of Commerce and with the Trade Union of Journalists of Florence. Shara has published several articles and participated as speaker in various conferences and workshops (among which: e-Privacy, Florence 2007; LSPI, Prague 2008; La disciplina delle varie forme di comunicazione, Rome 2008; ICIL, Thessaloniki, 2011).

She joined the IS Unit in May 2011, to work on the techno-economic assessment of e-ID services issues. She will focus on legal gaps in the existing digital identity regulatory framework. She will contribute to identifying favourable conditions for safe and effective personal data management, and also look into the future impact of possible eID architectures and suitable policy options.